Urban Legend: Cassandra's Radio Tales

The legend of Midnight Tales with Cassandra still abounds on the American East Coast. It’s said that, in the summer of 1973, a radio drama began appearing on an otherwise unoccupied AM band – while most believed the show to be a pirate broadcast, all seem to agree on the surprisingly high level of production values that went into the fourteen known episodes. Although the audio is reported to have been extremely crisp, most also cite their belief, at the time, that the shows were presented as artistic endeavors involving very little standard plotting, and heavily relying on incidental, naturalistic, dialog to explain the events as they unfolded.

Hosted by Cassandra, a sensuously-voiced woman, each episode opened with a theme played on pipe-organ, followed by a brief introduction by the hostess herself. While no transcripts remain of her prefaces, the apparent tag-line “listen now, or be doomed to repeat it,” is usually ascribed by those who claimed to have tuned in.

Not much attention was paid to the transmissions, as interest in radio as a method of telling stories had long been superseded by rock & talk programming blocks. This lack of relevance is also often cited as the reason why none of Cassandra’s tales were recorded. The only physical evidence that the broadcasts happened rests on then fourteen-year-old Benjamin Earl, who states that he happened across the show at the midway point of its first broadcast, and was careful to record each successive title, provided by the hostess, in his diary.

The Murder of Selma Tyrone

Saigon Follies

The Three Mile Problem

Flight 191

St. Helen’s Warning

The Fall of the Hyatt Regency

The Lost Return of the Challenger

The Preacher’s Swagger

The Rise of the Mississippi

Terror Comes To Oklahoma

The Library Massacre

The Waning Towers

The Heat of Okuma

Finale

It was only after The Three Mile Problem was realized to be an eerily faithful enumeration of the events that took place, in 1979, at a nuclear plant in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania – six years after the broadcasts – that listeners began to attempt to piece together the chronology presented by Cassandra.

While most of the episodes have now been linked (retroactively, skeptics argue,) with real life events, the fourteenth presentation, Finale, has yet to be solved out to an actual happening. The episode, remembered as fifteen minutes of a large group weeping and screaming, followed by a bassy rumble, then ten minutes of a lone child’s sobs, leaves few clues for those active in the forums and blogs that have sprung up around the mystery.